Deadly Serious
by Sybil Seether
Summary: Ponyboy deals with Johnny's suicidal tendencies.
1. Chapter 1

I saw him sitting on the curb by the vacant lot, eyes and head down. Johnny. He was always so sad. You could feel that sadness coming off of him, even when he smiled, which wasn't often. I thought about how different my friends were, how Two-bit was always smiling and joking and laughing. Everything was such a big joke to him. Nothing was a joke with Johnny. It was all so deadly serious. I understood that. I felt like that most of the time. My parents being dead, Darry always being on my case, the poverty, it wasn't a joke. But sometimes I liked not to care so much and to laugh once in a while. Things weren't really much of a joke to Dally, either. He was kind of serious in his own way, but unlike Johnny, he went after anyone who bothered him, or anyone who he perceived as bothering him. Johnny never did, not really. He took things, and that made me wonder about the switch blade in his back pocket. Would he ever really use it?

But I'd seen that changed look in his eyes after the beating by the socs. It was basically the same, still defeat and fear and distrust, but there was something else there, too. Something hard to define. Some kind of being fed up, being pushed too far, sort of. It was hard to pin down, but it was there.

He used to talk about killing himself before that, and now he talked about it but with more conviction. I'd get so scared whenever he mentioned it, thinking he'd really do it. Suicide terrified me, it seemed so dark. But it must seem like the only way out for Johnny.

"Hey, man, what's up?" I said, sitting next to him. It was sunny out, and the sky was a light blue. The sun felt nice. I turned my face up to it.

"Hey," he said, and I could tell nothing was too wrong with him right now, and the sad look almost went away. He pushed it away, I knew that, too. When I'd seen him sitting there he hadn't seen me. When you come up on people and see them before they see you, if they're alone, you can kind of see how things really are for them. Everything's a little bit of an act around other people. But I don't think greasers do that as much as socs do, the socs are pretty fake with each other, and probably to themselves as well.

I smoked and so did he, both of us cupping our hands against the wind. His jet black hair was heavily greased, like it always was, and practically gleamed in the sun. I saw the scar that was high on his cheek, shiny and straight, like some tribal scarring or something. His nails were all bitten down to the skin, and the skin around them was all raggedy. Nervous habit. I couldn't count the times I'd seen him gnawing on those nails.

I usually hung out with Johnny because it was convenient. Soda and Darry worked, Darry worked all the time, and when Soda wasn't at work he was pretty much with Sandy. Two-bit and Dally drank too much, and got into too much trouble. I'd drank before, too, but just got sick. Johnny didn't drink when he hung out with me, but he did drink, I knew it. I'd seen him drunk, stumbling up the steps to our house, puking over the railings of the porches of bars and pool halls. I bet he might become an alcoholic like his folks. It ran in families. But if he was hanging out with me he didn't drink. I knew something else, too. Johnny was 16 and he looked a lot younger but he wasn't really a young 16. He'd seen a lot, and he'd been through a lot. He thought I was kinda young, just a kid. Maybe I was. 14 wasn't so old. I knew everyone considered me to be just Darry and Soda's kid brother.

I guessed there was nothing I could do about that perception. And I was getting tired of thinking so much, of analyzing everything because it didn't seem to help. Sometimes it just made me feel worse. We finished our cigarettes and pitched them into the road.

"What do you want to do?" I said to him, and he thought about it for a minute.

"I don't know. Pinball?" he said, and I nodded. We stood up and headed over to the bowling alley, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jean jacket. I watched him play for awhile, listening to the little sounds of the pinball machine. He was pretty good. I wanted to just be a kid for awhile. I knew everyone thought I was so young, even Johnny thought it, but I didn't feel like a kid at all. Maybe that was because my parents were dead. I felt all the troubles of the world piling up on me, just this endless list of things. Poverty, violence, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency. All this stuff under these huge headings, so big there was no way to fix it or solve anything. I just wanted to be a kid for one day.


	2. Chapter 2

We were outside again, wandering the streets. It was dark. Johnny looked nervous even though he was with me. I guess I wasn't much protection, not like Dally would be. No one fucks with Dally. Unfortunately people fucked with us all the time.

I could see the way Johnny would slide his eyes to the side, the tense set to his shoulders. I knew he was edgy and nervous because I knew him but strangers wouldn't see this. He looked just as tough as the rest of us, with his greased hair and his T-shirt and black sneakers. He looked like he could kick your ass, and he could, if it was one person. But that time in the lot, it was four or five. No one has a chance against four or five.

If he was with anyone else this would be about the time they'd go and have a drink. But not me. I guess I was too much of a kid to drink with. And anyway, Darry wouldn't be too happy if he knew I was drinking. He was much stricter than my father had been.

All the homework I had to do was on my mind, but I wasn't much in the mood for it, to tell you the truth. I wanted to wander around the streets with Johnny, checking out girls, smoking, drinking pepsi's. We stopped at one of the diners in town and got some sodas, and flirted with girls. Well, not me. I wasn't exactly that into girls. But I watched a bunch of girls flirt with Johnny, tugging on his jacket, leaning their heads against his arms and shoulders. He'd shrug away from them and was even more quiet, if that was possible.

"Hey, you hang around with Dallas Winston, don't you?" they said to him, and I had slunk away to the corner since I was basically being ignored.

"Yeah," he said, his head down, but I heard the pride in his answer.

We left after a little while and I kidded him about all the girls hanging all over him. Sometimes girls really liked Johnny. They saw the wounded look in his eyes. They wanted to save him.

"I guess I better go home and do homework," I said, shuffling my feet, "you wanna come?" I knew that sometimes, a lot of times, Johnny wouldn't go home. It was bad at his house. So he shrugged and agreed to come with me. I could do homework with Johnny around. It wasn't a good idea to try it with Two-bit blabbering away.

"Hey, Johnny, hey, Ponyboy," Soda said when we walked in. Darry wasn't home yet. I went to our room to do homework and I heard Johnny rummaging in the fridge. I heard the T.V. blasting in the living room. Johnny never did homework. It was part of the reason he flunked out last year.

I rushed through math but took my time with the English. I always tried to get the deeper meaning out of what we were reading. I thought I could do it, sometimes. I thought I could write shit, maybe. After it was all done, I wrote the paper for next week and read all the history chapters and did a chem lab, I had this low level headache. The light wasn't that great in our room. I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, trying not to think about how I wanted all A's and wanted a scholarship so I could go to college and get out of this hellhole.

"Are you done?" Johnny said, holding a can of Darry's beer and smoking. I looked at the beer can, Darry's usual brand, and wondered how many he's had. From the sober enough way he was talking I figured not many. I didn't care if he drank, I just worried about it a little.

"Yeah, all done," I said, looking at my books stacked neatly on my desk. I watched Johnny take a long swallow of the beer. He sat down on the bed, kicking his heels on the floor.

"Did Soda take off?" I said, and Johnny nodded.

"Yeah, with Sandy,"

I looked at the darkness against the windows and blinked. I was suddenly so tired.

"I'm sick of this," Johnny said suddenly, putting one leg up on the bed. I noticed the fading black eye he had, and I hadn't noticed it before. I didn't need to ask what he was sick of, I knew. It was kind of the same things I was sick of. The socs, the divisions in this city, the way we had nothing and seemingly never would, but he had other things to be sick of. His parents always giving him shit, his mom screaming at him all the time, his father knocking him around every other day. He looked angry and sad at the same time, and he took another swallow of the beer. That beer was all I could smell. It reminded me a little of my dad, and that was a good memory. My dad would only have one or two once in a while, and I remembered that smell, sitting on his lap when I was real little.

"Yeah, me, too," I said. He looked off toward the windows and said in a real quiet voice, "sometimes I wish I could just kill myself,"


End file.
